CONGRATULATIONS TO TOM GLAVINE: 300 WINS!!!
And yet, strangely enough, I still think appearing in a commercial with Heather Locklear is the highlight of his career.
You watch this and you get the sense of how far we've gone with the issue of performance enhancement. To the point where (unfortunately I think) the term performance enhancement, which in isolation seems like it should be a positive term, has been given a dirty name in sports.
Anyway, I think we'll look back and find this was when baseball was reaching its apex in popularity, although in spite of the noise from the MSM (mainstream media), attendance figures are through the roof.
Nobody is staying away from the Barry Bonds Home Run Tour, even on the road, sellouts abound.
Gotta love the protest moves as well, the eye shades that nobody wears while Bonds is hitting. The boos when he comes to bat, that turn to cheers when he hits home runs on the road. And booing your own pitcher for trying to win the game and pitch around the baddest hitter on the planet, and maybe in the history of the game.
Anyway, chicks dig the long ball seems so quaint now. And I have a bad feeling in another 10 or 20 years we're going to realize that the so-called steroid era is going to seem like child's play in our rear-view mirror, once we enter, maybe the genetic engineering era. Or the Yankee cloning of A-Rod and Derek Jeter era.
Enjoy it now, because if the purists have their way, we'll go back to boring ass baseball games like in the 70's. 25% capacity attendance like it was in "the good old days" instead of 75% capacity like we have now. We have teams that can score only when the defense commits gross incompetence due to fatigue and/or lethargy since their team is out of the pennant race in mid-May. Because the level playing field we should have been more concerned about was the salary disparity, not this made up "crisis" of performance enhancement.
Remember when Uncle Bud "Pocket Hockey" Selig told us how baseball was in such a financial crisis that teams would have to be folded. Like the Devil Rays and Marlins and Twins and Expos. Whatever happened to that crisis? It wasn't fixed, that's for sure. It was papered over. But it wasn't fixed.
Just my opinion. But they want to change the product that clearly the consumers (the fans) are telling them doesn't need to be fixed (if it ain't broke....). And they continue to ignore the problem that needs fixing the most. They buy the owners silence in the small-markets with hush-money and those owners pass along a false message of hope to their fans while pocketing the hush-money instead of improving the team and making it competitive. Which, I have to admit, given the system in place, spending the money to become competitive is almost certainly an exercise in futility.
Should be an interesting next few years in baseball. At least we don't have to worry about soccer taking over as the next great spectator sport. Funny too, the experts back in the day were so worried about soccer surpassing baseball, I don't remember anybody mentioning the threat from NASCAR?
Tough to rely on these experts nowadays.
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